Riot: If X is broken, tweak Y. Never directly address the problem so the game and meta stay in flux.

(not a quote)

This obviously seems to be their design and balance philosophy and I for one hate it. Because it progressively breaks more things than it fixes. Especially in combination with their targeted changes to simplify and randomize the game.

More all-round damage for instance means that no matter how bad you are, you can get kills, get fed and carry a game through sheer brute force luck because it take 1 lucky "outplay" for a kill, instead of the consistent need to out-trade before you can commit with an ignite like it was a few seasons ago. And that kill not only gives you a gold advantage, due to kill/assist scaling runes, you can get raw stats to further the difference so that 1 or 2 kills has the same effect as 5 or 6 used to. Anybody been watching LCS? It's mostly 1 team getting 1 or 2 kills on a carry and then just snowballing that advantage till they take the nexus. It's boring.

And it's boring to play also. There is no challenge when ahead, and there is no hope when behind. For half of the game you are just going through the motions, trying to enjoy that catch-kill but ultimately knowing it wasn't a fair fight so getting only a hollow sense of satisfaction from it.

That's a good word for it, hollow. It feels like the game has been hollowed out. It still kinda looks the same, but slowly over time the changes that seemingly started around season 5 with the Juggernaut patch have taken most of at least the strategy of this game. Pity.